


The Dolorous

by TanukiKyle



Series: RebelStuck [1]
Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: AU, Doomed Timeline, Multi, No Sgrub AU, Sadstuck, rebelstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-06
Updated: 2013-03-06
Packaged: 2017-12-04 12:42:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/710905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TanukiKyle/pseuds/TanukiKyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Kanaya Maryam, and you tell stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dolorous

 

Vriska goes first.

 

She has aaaaaaaallllllll the luck. She’s gotten out of scrapes that would kill others eight times over. She’s almost more machinery than troll, bionic arms and bionic leg and a portion of torso complete with artificial rumble spheres – what’s the good being artificial if you can’t be hot with it!!!!!????

But in the end, luck leaves her between a rock and a hard place, and she makes the wrong call. Tavros brings her back. He bares his teeth and snarls at you, at Equius, when they try to approach. He controls Terezi’s Lusus to keep them at bay, and the damaged boy who couldn’t hate, who’s blackrom was built around annoyance at best and kinks at worst, he’s more terrifying than you imagine.

You’re given the bloodpusher, strung through with pumps and wires. You and Terezi squelch it between their teeth, swallowing the last of Vriska Serket.

The toxic filtration sponge is Feferi’s. Her hand shakes as she holds it, the very last thing she will balance on the tally of Vriska’s life.

Aradia takes the bilesac, potent with acid. She drains it, distils Vriska into an explosive that in the coming weeks will explode a whole pack of Imperial Drones, but not before taking another chunk from Aradia’s ear when the explosion backfires only a little.

Lucky, is the silent consensus.

Nobody asks what Tavros has done with the rest of the body, or the aeration sacs. Nobody’s surprised when there’s a pale scar of Vriska’ sign on his torso which moves when he breathes, either.

 

 

 

  
But for all his grief, it is Aradia who goes next. Not in a glorious burst of flame, not from an explosion, not even from poison or silent assassination in the night.

She dies as her heart pops, strained and damaged. You and Equius work feverishly on her, but in the end there is only so much you can replace, so much repurposed metal and stolen drugs can do and a lowblood’s immune system sometimes gives up long before they do.  
  
Sollux takes to visiting her old hive. It’s dangerous, stupid; his psionics allow him to get there and back but they’re bright, flashy and it leaves him tired, worn-out with the voices of the dead banging around in his head but never the ones he needs.

You walk in on him more than once ; fucking, being fucked or just fighting, tumbling, spilling three shades of blood across the floor in the biggest quadrant flipping disaster three boys have ever been on.

It used to be cute.

 

 

 

 

You may have jinxed things, thinking about assassination.

A seadweller is immune to almost every poison, and those that they aren’t are hard to procure, harder to use and even then are rarely successful on the highest of high.  
  
But Feferi sleeps dry, now. The horrorterrors welcome her, a princess of the deep and she says that they tell her about the dead. You all quietly, desperately ignore her, save Eridan who over the sweeps and through injury has lost all flush for Feferi Peixes and now more than anything wants to help her, save her. He paps her gentle as the brush of silk over sheathed blades, and talks to her quietly, under and over breath because to win the revolution your new empress must, at the least, be sane.

And so it is not her who is found in her ‘coon in the day but Equius, who’s STRENGTH is contained by her stronger sopor, who in the night with his long, silky hair could easily be mistaken for a Heiress with similar tresses.

You lay him to rest among the fields he used to watch as a wriggler, where Vriska no doubt plagues the land still in memory if not in form and where at the edge of the horizon flocks a herd of animals he once so admired.

 

 

 

Nepeta and Tavros go together. You don’t have it in you to be surprised. Nepeta’s rebuilt spine, her movable tail were the finest of Equius’s work, matched perhaps only by Tavros’s legs. Nobody else could ever hope to maintain them.

But that is not why they go on their suicide run. Tavros is almost quadrantless now, and with no pale, no black, he turns it all inwards onto himself. Nepeta kisses her matesprit lightly, leaves one last scar on her kismesis and accompanies him. She confided to you she had never known who she would be without her moirail.

You suspect she does not wish to find out.

 

 

They go out in a glorious attack, Nepeta hunting animals into Tavros’s range and he using the ability to control them to wreck, to scatter, to cleave. You think before they die they have probably massacred at least half of the Empire troops.

But here is the thing; the Empire has more, and now you are only eight.

 

 

 

 

Perhaps it is Vriska’s fascination with that number that sees you through the next few perigrees with no more deaths. The eight of you are too close and too far apart at the same time. You clutch quadrantmates and allies alike with equal fervor, then turn icy gazes upon them in the morn because rebels died all the time but you were _revolutionists_ \- you fought for a _cause –_ but who was going to go next?

As it turns out, it’s Eridan.

He grew up, over the sweeps, but he also grew  sharp. Of all of you, you did not expect him to die. A master tactician, a sniper who could pin-point the one weakpoint of an armoured lusus or mechanised drone in a split second,  seadweller tough with a psionic quadrantmate who taught him every trick to avoid and engage and to stay aliivve – but you didn’t expect anyone to die, did you.

He took a very long time to kill, you hear, and despite the Empire’s best efforts (and that phrase makes you throw up, makes you regurgitate all that you’ve eaten in forever because you know; you know) told them nothing.

It doesn’t quite make you feel better.

Karkat and Sollux still flip quadrants as often they flip tables but sometimes they pause as if waiting for someone else to butt in and then look so very lost. Feferi and Gamzee hold them tight but they are one shade too bright in each direction and different besides.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Terezi goes the rebellion is embers with no breeze, wood with no carpenter. There is nobody left now to direct things, to play the long game, to stop Feferi screaming horrors and throwing her ‘dent  and coming in at the wrong direction. Nobody to remind Karkat that one town means nothing in the face of a war; to stop Sollux from burning himself new scars to save one child. Nobody to stop you fussing over the small things and forgetting the big.

 

 

You all eat her organs, each parted out into exactly five pieces.

 

 

 

 Gamzee goes neatly into four and you all sleep dry curled around each other and hoping silently ; privately that the horrorterrors will let you in to speak to the dead and you spend each day wild-eyed and pushing the last drips of rebellion because it can’t be for nothing it can’t but –

 

 

 

But there’s nothing left, now, should you win. Feferi is scarred up and burnt out and one arm withered but Equius’s prosthetics are a thing of the distant, distant past and sanity is a thing it seems none of you possess – even as shock troops you would be culled because you kill like demons, but like the feathery beasts you can barely tell friend from foe only the aftermath, more often than not you wake with limbs in mouths and teeth stained in a colour you’d never choose to wear.

 

It’s this withered arm that gets her, a splash of tyrian that makes the offender pause but it is too late her head tumbles from her shoulder and Karkat’s sickle bursting through the troll’s flesh is but an afterthought ; you will remember her expression for eternity but you could not tell anyone the shape of the attackers horns, let alone the colour that sprayed as the three of you tore him to pieces.

 

 

 

 

 

Without her the horrorterrors seem paradoxically closer and further ; you travel to the sea even as you bleed the closer you get. She mourns quietly in respect for her charge but still she mourns and the world mourns with her.

You perhaps could make a claim that you three mourn the most, though.

Sollux is bleeding  constantly now, from nose or ears or eyes. You are slightly better off and Karkat doesn’t bleed at all, he cannot hear it and occasionally you think perhaps he is not a troll at all; perhaps he is the next stage, the next evolution. Fire-hearted revolutionists who care too much and sleep too little and spend far too much time in love.

The imperials find you,  and Sollux burns in the fires of his own makings. He would never consent to be caught ; from ruins and journals and forbidden tomes you have all learned your ancestors in time and each of you has denied them. Sollux will not endure, will not be shackled to the yoke. He will be free even if he dies for it - and he will blaze.

And he does, in red and blue and yellow that blend at the edges to make everything he goes out in a burst of colour that seems to envelope all and then

 

 

and then

 

 

 

 

there are two.

 

 

 

Two broken down beat up trolls with a fire that started a revolution and now nothing else ; consumed by the flames that drove them and inside they carry remnants of those who passed.

There was not enough left of Sollux to find organs. He was a splash of heavy gold amongst charcoal and you scooped it up and knew not whether this was dirt or flesh or cloth soaked with his blood among cinders but you took it anyway.

You take chunks of one another because you don’t know who will be left and whoever it will be will carry everyone.  Everything.  A weight and a burden and a treasure all at once but the kind of treasure that isn’t good for you, cursed gold and haunted iron weapons that harm the wielder

 

 

 

…you are all mad now.

 

 

 

You are almost to the sea when you are found. Not by imperials this time but by another troll who sees Karkat’s mutant blood in his scars and his eyes  and draws -  and your boy, your boy who started it all goes to his fate without a whisper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You are the only one left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

\--

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your name is Kanaya Maryam, and you ran a rebellion. You kissed the Empress and papped the Signless, played tonsil hockey with Mindfang and told the Summoner how to flirt with the Executioner. You brushed the Disciple’s hair and braided the Demoness’. You helped the Orphaner make the Psionic eat, and patched up Redglare when the Highblood managed to top. And all of you every last one disdained your Ancestors -  even if you approved of them - because you set out to make your own story.

But you failed.

  
And so now you mourn, and you do it in the breeding caverns as the wounds from your war slowly eat you alive. A Dolorosa incarnate and you tell the eggs and the grubs and the wigglers your stories because you didn’t make it, you didn’t win, your story is lost, nobody will hear it –

And you are the only one left to tell it.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is for my askblog, askrebelstuck.tumblr.com! It was in response to an ask I got: ==>FAIL


End file.
